00:00 Outlook brings to you excerpts from its latest issue titled Cinema Politico.
00:06 The issue explores politics and cinema and the ever-blurring lines between the two.
00:12 Ahead of 2024 Lok Sabha elections, a slew of propaganda movies have hit the big screen and OTT platforms amid much criticism and approach,
00:22 while many more films are slated to release in the coming weeks stirring even a bigger debate.
00:28 The latest issue of Outlook looks at the genre of nationalist and propaganda films in the Indian context
00:35 and also continues with the exploration of the ideology question in the context of upcoming general elections.
00:42 Both themes are contextual and linked in many ways.
00:47 Will Hindutva survive after 2024? By Ajay Gudavarti, an associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University,
00:56 where he explores how the ideology of Hindutva faces a challenge in staying relevant.
01:03 He explores why the ideology of Hindutva faces a challenge in staying relevant.
01:09 Ideology is not about the world out there, but how we desire to view it.
01:15 It is a way of organizing the chaos of our desires.
01:20 While most philosophers of the 20th century liken ideology to consciousness,
01:26 philosophers of the 21st century see it in the workings of the subconscious.
01:33 Ideologies allow us to represent the world in a way that allows us to relate to it and make it less inhabitable.
01:43 While there has been some talks of the world entering a post-ideological phase, political philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues,
01:51 rather counterintuitively, that this end of ideology signifies that ideology has come into its own,
02:00 as it is now so entrenched that it is invisible.
02:05 Ideologies are powerful when they no longer work as explicit ideologies,
02:11 but begin to become the collective subconscious, or simply the common sense of our times.
02:18 Further, ideology has conventionally been associated with the political domain.
02:24 Ideologies are political, belonging to dominant political parties and political mobilizations.
02:31 Ideologies were associated with governments and the state.
02:36 Ideologies were imposed top-down and consumed bottom-up.
02:41 Global thinking on this has changed to recognize that if ideologies are about representing the world
02:48 and help us relate with a sense of belonging, then it cannot be exclusively political, but also necessarily about culture.
02:58 Culture here refers to values, ideas, symbolism, ethics, and emotions.
03:05 Ideologies are collective expressions of individual experiences.
03:11 Ideologies help us to connect disparate-looking inner environments within us to collective being.
03:19 Ideologies connect psychological drives to collective imperatives.
03:25 Ideology, in current times, therefore, is essentially about the interface between the political and the cultural.
03:33 While the essence of culture is understood in terms of solidarity, oneness, and belonging,
03:40 political is about power and instrumental reasoning.
03:44 Ideologies of our times manage the conflictual relation between solidarity and instrumentality.
03:51 While culture contaminates the political, the political attempts to colonize culture.
03:57 While culture sets the gaze on the political being to modernist and individuated,
04:03 political rakes up the prejudices within culture that are historically constructed but made to look eternal and natural.
04:12 While historicity carries the burden of alienation, eternity, Sanatan, of culture carries the burden of hierarchy.
04:22 The supra-conflict of our times is how do we arrest modernist alienation that is soulless, amoral, and without intensity of emotions,
04:32 without that fight against alienation becoming a ruse, an illusion to justify and reinforce prejudice, exclusion, and hierarchies?
04:43 How do we construct ethico-political and politico-cultural ideologies to cohabit together as individuals, as communities, as nations,
04:54 and also globally and finally at a planetary level?
04:58 For this and more, read the latest issue of Outlook.
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